One thing you learn by writing down your thoughts on a semi-regular basis, as Ralph Waldo suggested might happen in "Self Reliance," is that you find what appears to you as the apparent lack of logical answers to questions about public matters reflects the real absence of logical answers to those same questions. Which is to say, if you trust your own instincts about matters of poltiical concern, you often find that what parades as "conventional wisdom" is simply the repeated formulations of "opinion makers" who want to sound very Serious and who wish to speak the language of other Serious People who shape public debate.
I think this tendency grew exponentially worse during the Bush years because The Decider ushered in an agenda of Mass Stupidity that distorted rational discourse beyond all recognition. The war in Afghanistan is an excellent, perhaps the prime, example of this destructive effect. Afghanistan is widely regarded as the "good war," the one we definitely had to fight after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. No dissent from this view was allowed, on the Right (certainly) or even on America's "Left." Everyone from James Inhofe (Troglodyte,-OK) to Al Franken agreed that Afghanistan must be invaded. An opinion in favor of invading Afghanistan was the one true sign of an American Patriot. No ifs, ands, buts, cavils or misgivings allowed. It had to be done.
"It" is still going on. It's now 2009 and the invasion began in the fall of 2001. This war has now been going on (a) twice as long as our involvement in World War II and (b) somewhat longer than the main part of the Vietnam War. The theory was that Afghanistan provided a "breeding ground" for terrorists, or a "swamp" that must be drained, a reference, I guess, to anti-malarial measures taken in tropical countries. Osama, Zayman, Atef, all the bad guys were there. Plus, the Taliban were mean to women, unlike, say, the Saudis.
The 19 guys who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not from Afghanistan. Had they ever been to Afghanistan? I would like to see the federal government prove it with testimony other than that of the Gurgling Confessor, Khallid Sheikh Mohammed, who is quoted extensively, not to say exclusively, in the Report of the 9-11 Commission as the source of this evidence. Now that we know what we know about torture during the Bush years, is there any reason to rely definitively on this testimony?
What we do know is that the 19 Arabs were Egyptian, Saudi, Lebanese, UAE and Yemeni. The main plotters formed their cell in Hamburg, Germany, as members of the same mosque, and did their flight training in the United States, as well as most of their logistical planning. Hey, don't take my word for it; read the Commission Report.
A whole war against Afghanistan seems pretty dumb in such a context, but then George W. Bush was a very dumb guy. The urge to do something about 9/11 was definitely on his side, however, no matter how dumb. So we invaded the hated Taliban, who may have provided sanctuary to a guy who may have met with some of the guys who actually attacked us in September, 2001, and we came with the full force of the U.S. military, and it was a sterling victory until it fell completely apart.
However, then the Afghanistan War caught its big break. Bush outdid his own stupidity by launching another war against another irrelevant country, this time Iraq. Now the war in Afghanistan acquired the cachet of being the smart war that "Liberals" could favor, that should have been "finished," and the comparison, no matter how inane, allowed Democrats to appear "tough" and "belligerent" while at the same time exhibiting superior judgment and leadership. It also allowed Barack Obama to promise a "surge" in Afghanistan once he was elected, the dumb war he favored over the war in Iraq which he had famously called "dumb" when Bush was running it.
It's as if a guy starts a grease fire in his kitchen and then while casually and desultorily fighting it with an extinguisher, decides to start another fire in his bedroom. The kitchen becomes the "smart fire" which must be put out even though the dumb fire in the bedroom will also burn his house down if it keeps burning. "It was dumb to start that fire in the bedroom while I was still dealing with that grease fire," Joe, the distraught homeowner said to reporters in front of the charred ruins of his house. "I thought Joe was dumb to start that bedroom fire. I thought the grease fire in the kitchen was the smart fire, the one I would have fought," said Dirk, his neighbor, who's a pain in the ass.
The theory in both Afghanistan and Iraq is that there is some magical, unknown point, if we just stay long enough (forever, even), where both of these Muslim countries, thoroughly unpracticed in the tradition of Western democracy, will become stable, enduring, reliable strongholds of liberty. This is completely crazy. Once we leave both places, absolutely anything may happen in our absence. It is likely that both Afghanistan and Iraq will degenerate along tribal lines or devolve into dictatorships or military juntas, and go through the cyclical periods of unstable democracy and despotism found in modern Pakistan or Iran, just as two, highly relevant examples.
Meanwhile, bin Laden and Zawahiri are still at large. They could still get messages to another group of 20 Arabs, I suppose, and come up with something else. What do these wars have to do with that? Were those jungle gyms actually essential to hijacking American airplanes?
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